1. Technical Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a display controller, a display control method, a display control program, and a mobile terminal device that are well suited for adaptation to apparatuses handling character information and image information displayed on any one of apparatuses, such as such as mobile phones, PHS phones (PHS: personal handyphone system), and PDAs (PDA: personal digital assistant), and notebook/desktop personal computers. More specifically, the present invention relates to a display controller, a display control method, a display control program, and a mobile terminal device in which image information related to to-be-displayed character information can be automatically retrieved and displayed.
2. Description of the Related Art
Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2004-325937 (pp. 5-6: FIG. 4) discloses an image display controller in which, during sequential display of a plurality of still images, in which the images are displayed one by one, the display time period of the still image can be changed.
In the case of the image display controller, when a first button of a remote controller is depressed during serial display of still images, a display changing interval of the respective still image for serial display is reduced, thereby to perform high speed display changing of the still images. Alternatively, when a second button of the remote controller is depressed during sequential display of still images, a display switching time interval between display of still images for sequential display is increased, thereby to perform low speed display changing of the still images. Thus, even during sequential display of still images, the display time period of the respective still image can be changed.
Hitherto, information stored in the apparatus are managed separately depending on the type of information as in a case where, for example, e-mail information is managed as the type of e-mail information, and image information is managed as the type of image information. As such, in the event of retrieving desired image information from among many pieces of image information stored in memory, retrieval is performed in any one of the following manners. One manner is that the desired image information is retrieved in accordance with information memorized by a user. Another manner is that thumbnail images of the respective image information are list-displayed and a desired image is retrieved while viewing the thumbnail image list-displayed. Another manner is that, as in the image display controller disclosed in Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2004-325937, the many pieces of image information are displayed one by one, and the desired image information is retrieved therefrom.
However, image information, such as those having been unretrievable and/or having not been remembered as the user has forgotten the image capture event therefor miss opportunities of display and the like, such that the image information are cannot be effectively used despite the images were captured.
Under these circumstances, it would be desirable to provide a display controller, a display control method, a display control program, and a mobile terminal device that handle character information and image information in correlation with one another, and that, in the event of displaying the character information, automatically display thumbnail images of the image information correlated to the to-be-displayed character information, thereby to effectively exploit image information stored in memory.